Gaming on a Virtual Machine?

[Wufflez]

I have an iMac, and I was curious if I could play windows games on it. I first started thinking of turning into a windows machine all together, but I was wondering if running a virtual machine inside of Mac OS would be possible to game with? Anyone have any experience with this?

[Turtle Rig]

You will run into problems and issues.  Your frame rate will be much much much lower then in Windows itself if it works that is.

[Snipergod87]

Try using bootcamp instead.

Gaming thru virtualization like that (I have done it) leads to terrible performance like sub 20 FPS, even with all the 3D acceleration boxes checked.

[Noorquacker]

Use Bootcamp.

Like Snipergod87 said, gaming in virtualization is terrible. The reason why is because the VM does not really have control over the GPU, so games in a VM can't really access the GPU¹ for doing their 3D magic. Therefore, VirtualBox, QEMU, or whatever you're using for macOS, has to use the CPU to render everything manually and use a lot of virtualization tricks in order to do so. This leads to terrible performance, even worse than integrated graphics.

 

¹ Yes, there's a way to give GPU access to VMs, it's called VFIO. It's an extremely deep rabbit hole that's mainly for Linux users anyways, I doubt Macs even have the hardware for it.